In the first installment of this series, I talked about the problems with the Inner Child character, but I didn’t mention the biggest one. It deserves its own deep dive, because it represents another major problem in Tom Batiuk’s writing: misguided characterization.
But first, I’d like to talk some more about my arcade machine. Harriet’s stories about her cows inspired me to ramble a little about one of my interests. And, because I want to make it clear I’m not anti-nostalgia. I’m not such a hater that I can’t enjoy watching someone else delve into their childhood passion. But as we’ll see in this series, Tom Batiuk pushes this privilege way too far.
Everybody in 2023 still knows Pac-Man, but I wonder how much people really know about it. Its pop culture weight was so massive, it’s hard to measure by modern standards. It just hovered over everything.
Like a lot of people in 1980, I had Pac-Man Fever, from Akron’s own Buckner & Garcia. It was the first pop record I ever owned. The album had seven other songs, which were all about arcade games too. “Do The Donkey Kong” is probably the best one. I also had my mom make me a Blinky costume for Halloween one year. It was a red cloth draped over some hoop-skirt thing to give it the right shape, and the big eyes were made out of white and black felt circles. I also had the board game, cereal, school notebooks, Saturday morning cartoon, and all that dumb stuff. I was 8, and this is exactly what you do when you’re 8.
But the game itself is kind of an urban legend, despite it still being widely available. Pac-Man suffers badly in comparison to the much better Ms. Pac-Man. This sequel introduced four different mazes, moving fruits instead of stationary ones, and better enemy logic. And the available versions of Pac-Man are often variations on the original, from the giant simultaneous-player arcade machine to the playable Google doodle.
About that enemy logic: the way to beat Pac-Man in 1980 was to memorize patterns for each level. Even when most people barely knew what a computer was, the public figured out that the enemies moved in predictable ways. There were all kinds of books you could buy with diagrams of how to go through each maze. Some of them even had stunts. Clearly people put a lot of effort into it.
I was never a pattern guy, so I gravitated to games where that wasn’t the way to win, like Centipede, Berzerk, Frogger, Missile Command, and Harry and Donna’s favorite Defender. I did the pattern-memorization thing during my earlier Rubik’s Cube phase (another thing people don’t realize how huge it was), and I wasn’t excited to memorize patterns again. When the Nintendo Entertainment System came around, I wasn’t that enthused, because a lot of its games seemed to depend on memorization too.
Is Pac-Man still fun to play? Absolutely. As you hopefully didn’t notice from my prior screenshot, my scores are not high. And it doesn’t hold my interest for repeated playings. But it’s always fun to take for a spin, and fun is what it’s all about. It pleases my inner child.
Unlike Jeff’s Inner Child, who shouldn’t be in this story at all. Because this story isn’t about Jeff’s childhood at all. Jeff’s most recent incident having to do with comic books involved Ed Crankshaft:
This raises an immediate question: why isn’t Crankshaft the villain of this story? He has committed the second-most important misdeed in the Funkyverse criminal code: Deprivation Of Comic Books. It’s ahead of Liking The Internet, but behind Offending Les Moore’s Precious Precious Feelings About His Dead Wife Because He’s Such A Sensitive Artist.
Ed Crankshaft is a combination of character types never seen anywhere else in fiction. On one hand, he’s a type we all know: the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. Many famous TV characters are this type: Archie Bunker, Basil Fawlty, Al Bundy, Sheldon Cooper, Michael Scott, Barney Stinson, Peter Griffin, Eric Cartman, Rick Sanchez. And after Seinfeld, it became common for the entire cast to be this. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of many examples.
But Ed Crankshaft is also a Karma Houdini. He’s frequently shown dangling from roofs, having to be rescued from fires, and doing massive damage to other people’s property. All for no reason other than his own malicious, reckless idiocy. And no matter what he does, nothing bad ever happens to him. The story carefully cuts around any moment where someone might suggest he did anything wrong.
These two character types don’t go together. We want to see the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist get what he deserves, at least sometimes. Even if we like the character, it’s still satisfying to see obnoxious behavior get punished. And in the Funkyverse, it never is.
We never see any repercussions for Crankshaft. Or Dinkle, when he’s slave-driving a bunch of elderly church volunteers to feed his own ego, or treating his wife like a blow-up doll. Or Funky, when he pointlessly abuses some seminar presenter or hijacks a doctor’s office and a room full of recovering alcoholics to workshop his lame comedy material. Or Mort, when he sexually harasses Lillian. Or Phil Holt, when he fakes his own death. Or Melinda, when she bullies her daughter into a serious injury. And that’s just from the final two years!
I didn’t even mention the worst offenders: Les Moore and Pete Whateverhisname is. These characters also have a third problem: Tom Batiuk doesn’t realize they’re unsympathetic. That’s a whole other deep dive.
The Unsympathetic Protagonist also being the Karma Houdini is a regular feature of the Funkyverse. And it’s why these characters and this world are so unlikeable.
In our next installment, we examine how Tom Batiuk retcons his own story to make it about what he wants it to be about, instead of what he wrote the first time.
Son of Stuck Funky 
BJ6000,
Home run buddy!
1. I liked your analysis of The Unsympathetic Protagonist. You are right. TB thrives on it. There is no one likable in this strip. When he rediscovers the Fairgoods, it’s like finding ant hills on the 4th of July. He purposes to destroy them and our opinion of the characters. Les More must be rewarded every time. I know of only 2 times that Les got his. Once last year at a football game, and another time last year on a golf course, Funky hit a ricochet and knocked out Les. Perfection. I don’t remember the artist, but cleverly drawn.
2. My older sister brought an Atari 2600 home. It had a bunch of games. My favorites were the baseball game 2 player. Wonderful game play. Then there was a Haunted House game you played in the dark. Different and fun.
3. But my favorite game was M. U. L. E. for the Atari 800. It belonged to my best friend. He and I would partner against the lying, cheating, backstabbing, crooked, conniving computer players. We played thousands of games. Until he passed away in 2019. I got to see him twice on his very last day. Then on my way to work at 0630 in the next morning, I got a text from his wife telling me that he passed peacefully.
There is a saying that has more optimism than you realize: “Life is a bitch, and then you die, but it is worth it.”
4. What a horrible heat wave. Yesterday in KC, it was 100°. Then it dropped to 99.9°. Everyone put on their winter jackets.
5. Last of all, he has probably commented and I must have not seen it, but I sure do miss reading comments by TF Hackett. Any chance of reading something by him. I have so much love and respect for TF. That would make for a nice Thursday.
M.U.L.E. is an excellent game with a kickass soundtrack. I’m glad you got to enjoy it with your friend.
Thank you, Will.
It was such a good game. The creator Dani Bunten also made “Global Conquest.” It was a very sweet multiplayer game. It was made in 1992, and had Little Rock as the world capital. Very appropriate.
Thank you again.
Pac-Man may suffer in comparison to Ms. Pac-Man, but as a kid growing up with TurboGrafx-16, my first interaction with the franchise was Pac-Land… inexplicably a platform game that heavily referenced the television cartoon that resulted from the original Pac-mania boom. Pac-Man does not suffer in comparison to Pac-Land, where poor Pac sprouted Durwood’s original nose.
To an avid Pac-Man player, playing Pac-Land must have been like an avid Act I FW reader coming back to the strip in mid-Act III.
Pac-Land is another game that’s on my Arcade1Up cabinet. And, it’s the only reason the machine needs three buttons; all the other games use one or no buttons. Seems like a lot of hardware for a very inessential title.
And you’re right it about being like FW Act III. Because it has the same problem: it threw away its best qualities. Pac-Man isn’t a platformer; it’s a maze game. Funky Winkerbean shouldn’t be a ball of misery; it should be a fun, irreverent, surreal look at high school. But Tom Batiuk insisted on making it into Pac-Land XVIII: Ms.Pac-Man Gets Pac-Cancer rather than simply admit that direction didn’t work.
Though it took a decade, Namco didn’t quite admit defeat in making Pac-Man into something it wasn’t… This time as a dumbed down version of the kind of point-and-click adventure games that LucasArts and others were releasing to critical and commercial success. The ineptly-named Pac-Man 2 hit US store shelves with this ridiculous box art.
It’s funny, Pac-Man was a tremendously innovative game but in Pac-Land and Pac-Man 2, Namco went from leader to follower and grafted Pac-Man onto wannbe clones of Mario Bros. and Sam & Max.
I think Pac-Man also doesn’t work for that kind of game, because he isn’t a very good character. It’s like trying to make a
story about Tetris pieces. They exist solely because the game mechanics need them to be the shapes they are. They make no
sense outside of that world. Pac-Man has no purpose other than to consume everything, and Kirby is a better character of that type.
Indeed, it takes a lot of work to make Pac-Man into a character at all. I did think the cartoon Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures was a solid effort at that, but it is so hard to find anything for Pac in the middle ground between maze video game and 52 episode television series.
Banana, I think you can definitely be justified in writing three times as much for these entries. The parallels that you draw upon the experiences in your life and that of others, as well as citing TVTropes among other content, draws a contrast against TB’s work – and that is what is necessary to illuminate just what exactly it is that makes TB’s work so specifically awful in its totality.
Where you led off and where I thought you were going to end up is something which I could easily expound upon myself for one paragraph after another. Video games. I’m 43 and have a somewhat similar lifelong attachment to the medium as well as to some 80s games at this point still. One point (of many) upon which I am something of a minority though is the lack of a total nostalgic attachment to an entire decade or era. Take away the nostalgia goggles and (I for one at least believe that) there are quite honestly very few games that are more than 20 or 30 years old at this point and still hold up against any video game made today. I personally find Ms. Pac Man to be the only one of the original Pac Man games which are worth playing today, and that’s only with the speed hack, and that turns out to be the one which is actually a ROM hack in itself and wasn’t made by Namco.
To tie this in with something that’s also concurrent, Diablo 4 just recently released. To spare reiterating over one million words that have been said about the Diablo series, there is a distinct group of people out there who will go to their graves in 20, 50, 70 years from now being completely earnestly adamant that Diablo 2 is the single best video game ever created. I’m not one of those people.
What those fans of Diablo 2 are to the ARPG-Loot games, and what some people are to specific eras or genres or platforms of games (16-bit JRPGs or 2D platformers, 80s arcade, early 2000s MMORPG/FPS, pre-MS Minecraft), TB is to comic books. Sure, he’ll make mention of something actually made in this century once in a while, but we know that if the general topic is comics, TB will be there to romanticize his indefatigable 12-year-old infatuation to what was new at that time. He’s not alone in his love for that specific period of that specific product. He knows that he can bank on that specific nostalgic reflection upon that specific product and time and speak to an audience which will affirm an identical perception. He and that cohort will lovingly embrace each other and gently caress their bosoms until they are all buried. On one hand, it’s all about youth oriented comic books so there’s an extent to which such romanticism isn’t onerous or offensive. On the other, the ceiling of that extent drops with each passing year, as that audience does.
Regardless, the gocomics CS comments show that the audience is there and that the specifics truly are irrelevant for them. Despite having precious little context clues or purpose, few of the non-snarking 60+ crowd there had an issue with parsing Yng Jff and what function that character was intended to provide. TB served up some pulpy ‘member berries and they ate it up.
Fair enough – and little more to be said if that’s all that it ever was with the strip. But it isn’t.
Take away the nostalgia goggles and (I for one at least believe that) there are quite honestly very few games that are more than 20 or 30 years old at this point and still hold up against any video game made today.
I agree. From the classic arcade oeuvre, I list Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Joust, Defender, Robotron: 2084, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Q-Bert, Missile Command and, Tempest are still fun to play today. Most other classic arcade games are inessential, or better versions of them exist.
But there were some overlooked ones: Millipede was a much better version of Centipede, and existed in my local sandwich shop until at least the mid-2000s. Mappy was another game of that time, which is on my Arcade1up unit and has some unique platform gameplay. Another classic forgotten classic I adore, from the early 1990s, was Rampart. A fleet of ships attack your castle, and you get Tetris-style pieces to rebuild it and claim more land. It really raised your blood pressure. And it could be played against other people.
Obviously Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter IIare great, but fighting games were never my cup of tea.
Your Karma Houdini bit was brilliant, and really got me thinking.
In the Funkyverse it’s very rare for ANYONE to suffer real consequences for their chosen actions. Batiuk mostly wants negative events to hit his characters randomly, because the god of the Funkyverse is a dick.
Some characters hold the ‘Unsympathetic Protagonist’ ball and do something stupid or mean, but it’s always the punchline of a joke that isn’t carried over into the future. Crankshaft’s tree might be on fire at the end of the arc, where he electrocutes it, but that isn’t a permanent consequence.
Also got me thinking about how many of the most famous Unsympathetic Protagonists still are given moments of sympathy. Sheldon Cooper, Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffen half of all characters played by Will Ferrel. They all get writers giving them moments meant to tug some heartstrings. And Cranky gets them too.
And, like Cranky, that tends to split the audience, between people who are okay with ‘the asshole has a heart’ and people who think the character’s unrepentant crimes preclude them from earning sympathy.
Ostricisation, shaming, and denoucing are moralizing corrective behaviors meant to encourage people in a group to behave within bounds by giving bad behanior a social consequence. You’re saying, if a person does this, they’re not really a person again until they atone. I’m not even 100% down on the idea of the shunning, as part of socialization.
But you see people demanding those standards when judging fictional characters too, I guess sensing that they need to hold up those standards so that real people know where the line is where they’ll be kicked from the zone of sympathy.
Maybe for an audience, again, that’s their choice, but I think it’s pretty juvenille to get pissy when assholes are shown with all their complexity. Like, how dare you show Cersei weeping over her asshole son! She doesn’t deserve sympathy!
But dude, my man, it’s believeable. It’s true to human behavior and the human condition. Sometimes you gotta show Fictional Lady Hitler petting a dog.
Hate me if you want, but I like the character of Crankshaft. I’ve known too many people like him. People who are too dumb and broken to recognize their own faults, but who still have positives and strengths. And at least Batiuk realizes that he’s got jerk/dick tendencies. Unlike stupid Les Moore. And at least sometimes Cranky gets his comuppance within the gag, ie, dangling in terror from a roof.
Crankshaft’s like the third Transformers movie to me. And, like the third Transformers movie, if you despise him I can see where you’re coming from. But I like it.
Dang it BJ6K! It’s too hot outside for you to get my brain working this hard.
Since Archie Bunker’s name’s come up here, I thought I’d share this memory.
Watching “All in the Family” was a weekly event in the Sparrow household, and one evening, as O’Connor and Stapleton sang the theme song, my father remarked:
“Guys like him never had it made.”
They thought they did, to be sure, and in the post-World War II era, they feel like they’ve lost something (listen to Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game” for a commentary on how useful they can be in winning elections; for a sense of how even a seeming victory can backfire on them, watch the multi-part strike episode, in which Mike points out to Edith that Archie and the union’s actually lost), much like Jimmy Porter’s assessment of his father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, in John Osborne’s *Look Back in Anger,* an Indian Army officer who with the Empire lost became “just one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining anymore.”
A coincidence: I’m re-reading *A Song of Ice and Fire* when I’m between booklists, and much as I’d like simply to hate Cersei Lannister, I can’t (even when I view her against the more admirable Catelyn Stark). Martin is too good an author to keep it simple and therefore stupid.
Why, that sounds like the title of a late and lesser Billy Wilder film (1964’s “Kiss Me, Stupid”), and that brings us to this.
Last weekend, I watched Wilder’s “Foreign Affair” again, in which Marlene Dietrich plays a woman who was seriously involved with the Nazis. She’s not depicted as a one-dimensional villainess, and co-scenarist Charles Brackett said it was crucial to the success of the picture that we learn what made her tick.
Umlauts for everyone, not simply for those from Iowa where “the tall corn grows”!
(Ah, Wilder: in “Double Indemnity,” there’s a joke about how Californians actually come from Iowa. In his political career, Earl Warren, who was born in the Golden State, continually invoked on the campaign trail his father who was born in Iowa, to the point that he became known as “Earl Warren of Iowa.”)
That’s the thing about the Bunkers of the world not having it made: O’Connor knew that better than anyone else. Norman Lear saw a cartoon. Carroll O’Connor saw a victim of his own stupidity and limitations.
We had an old fashioned donut shop near our house, you know the type. Been around since the 1960’s, everything made from scratch daily.
The regular crowd was a group of old men who would come every day and loiter over coffee and donuts. They would chat, make wisecracks, and read the paper. One guy loved Jumble and could usually figure it out directly, without solving many of the key words.
But all of them loved Crankshaft. I think they all saw a part of themselves in Ed. I would joke and ask if I could borrow the comics page as I was anxious to see what was happening in Funky Winkerbean. They would snarl and say that the strip is depressing or that they don’t understand it.
Sadly many of these guys passed away, and the owners of the shop retired several years ago. The last time I saw them they rented a tent at a local flea market and they dispensed “Wise advice for $1, money back if not delighted!”
Hey, I never said Crankshaft couldn’t have any positive qualities. He does. But his misbehavior is too severe, for what’s supposed to be a realistic world, and for someone who’s supposed to be the good guy. And he’s thoroughly protected from any negative feedback, as a further look at the Comic-Con story will illustrate.
Crankshaft is a character that works, and works well really actually… up until he doesn’t. There’s a line where such a character quickly goes from funny to insufferably awful and TB hasn’t been able to keep himself on the right side of it in years.
He used to be able to, whether that was giving Ed some shades of humanity or showing how his irredeemable character was a necessary piece in the strip’s (occasionally) over-the-top universe. One of his better Crankshaft stories that I recall was the one where Keesterman finally was able to get Shaft to stop backing up over his mailbox via ordinance from the city or the school district. This caused a butterfly effect of negative consequences that resulted in Keesterman all but begging Ed to back up his bus into his mailbox again. It was derivative, sure, but also silly enough to be funny and gave purpose to a long-running gag.
There’s a line where such a character quickly goes from funny to insufferably awful and TB hasn’t been able to keep himself on the right side of it in years.
Bugs Bunny remains likeable because he punches up. He picks on characters who were bigger, meaner, more obnoxious, have worse motivations, or were actively trying to hurt him. He doesn’t assault Granny and Tweety with mallets when they’re just trying to go about their day.
That’s the line Crankshaft crosses. He constantly does harm to other characters we’re supposed to empathize with, and for no good reason. The Keesterman story you mention was a good reason; he rarely has one.
“Bugs Bunny remains likeable because he punches up. He picks on characters who were bigger, meaner, more obnoxious, have worse motivations, or were actively trying to hurt him.”
This is the essential difference between the mayhem Warner Bros. characters commit and what Crankshaft unleashes on his victims. Bugs and The Road Runner, for example, are depicted as defending themselves from threats to their personal safety or domestic tranquility.
It’s actually odd that Batiuk didn’t pick up this basic lesson when he was reading his Silver Age comics.
Hey, I thought one of the rules was to not go off topic! This could go real off topic!
OKAY, I got a job at Kay-Bee Toys at the exact moment of the 1980s Video Game Implosion! Every game and even every console was so cheap, and I got a 25% employee discount! Big deal!
(hands begin shaking)
OKAY, I have a 2600! Okay, I have two. And an Intellivision! And an Intellivision 2, with Intellivoice! Well, you can’t prove that, or if I still have a Colecovision with the ADAM computer-like add-on!
(brow begins sweating)
Maybe I still have the 2nd NES ever sold in Connecticut, with the Light Gun and the Robot and also the original box!
(falls to floor and crawls, trying to reach TomyTronic 3D handheld and Bandai solar game, voice mumbling, trembling about his Nintendo Game Watch…long gone…so long gone…)
See?! I warned you! Off topic! I would never say that the best 2600 game is Robot Tank! Or Intellivision’s The Dreadnought Factor! Intellivoice’s B-17 Bomber? Nobody bought that besides me! Coleco’s Spy Hunter? Why, I merely have the t-shirt! (which never did fit) NES…I heard they had a good game or two.
I got the 2600 ET game for 75 cents, and I’m pretty sure Atari owes me a dollar for that.
Yeah I remember that ET game. I never bought it but had friends that did. I never got into that ET thing, it just never interested me.
Rusty:
The story of the ET game is far more interesting than the game. They hired one programmer, and demanded that it be ready in 6 weeks. of course it sucked!
For those of you who’ve never played it, the gameplay’s “ET falls in a hole and dies.”
One good programmer, even: Howard Scott Warshaw, the maker of Yar’s Revenge.
Not only did Warshaw have to write the game in 6 weeks, he had to come up with the gameplay concept and run it by Steven Spielberg himself just a couple of days after being told he was to work on it. Now, Spielberg was not unfamiliar with Warshaw, and had praised his work on Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark game… but his response to Warshaw’s pitch?
“Couldn’t you do something more like Pac-Man?”
Warshaw, ambitious and silently insulted (as he tells the story) by the suggestion, convinced Spielberg that the game concept needed to be something new and innovative. It was a fair point, and with anything close to a normal development schedule to work with it would have been a winning one.
It’s a funny what if, as Warshaw (one of Atari’s best) may well have produced a much more playable E.T game (“good” might be a stretch, 6 weeks is 6 weeks) had he caved to Spielberg and made it a Pac-Man clone. Probably would not have prevented the video game crash, but certainly could have made everyone look for a different scapegoat. Think of all the ink Custer’s Revenge missed out on!
Like St. Anger, E.T. isn’t good, but it’s impressive that it got done at all. It’s amazing Warshaw could come with anything that worked in that unrealistic timeframe, within the limitations of the 2600 (which were really a problem by 1983). The game is tedious, confusing, and not at all fun. But it worked, it had a plot, it aligned well with the movie, and the graphics were allright. He got dealt a bad hand, and played it about as well as anyone could.
Nothing Warshaw did with E.T. really could have prevented the video game crash, but E.T. was never really responsible for the crash in the first place. At least, it wasn’t the main offender. Ironically, the game that most caused the crash was, in fact, Pac-Man… at least, the Atari 2600 version of it. For anyone who remembers it, it… was not a very good port; the system just couldn’t handle a faithful recreation. So the console version didn’t have the bright colors or the cute sound effects, and lacked a lot of the charm that caused Pac-Man to propel the video game craze in the first place.
Which, in and of itself, might not have created the unmitigated disaster that followed. Except that someone at Atari got it in their heads that Pac-Man was going to be THE game. The one that EVERYONE was going to buy. They produced 12 MILLION cartridges for the game… at a time when the TOTAL sales of the console itself were only around 10 million. The plan apparently was for not only every single console owner to buy the game, but for a large number of people who didn’t own the console to go out and buy one JUST to get Pac-Man. Which would have been absurdly optimistic had the game actually been good. Which it wasn’t.
Suffice it to say, Atari couldn’t make up for the sales shortfall that caused, and no one else was positioned to step in and fill the gap… at least, not for a few more years.
The 2600 was so underpowered it couldn’t even show all four ghosts at the same time. That was why they flickered. This technique was used a lot on the 2600, but it really hurt Pac-Man. As you note, it took a scalpel to the game’s personality.
One other thing about arcade Pac-Man that I loved was that you could touch the ghosts a little and not die. Couldn’t do that in the Atari version; the slightest contact was instant death. The arcade machine also had a bug where you could actually go through the ghosts sometimes. Needless to say, that didn’t get ported over.
Atari’s impatience was a big factor in their undoing. On E.T. most famously, but on the Pac-Man port as well, which had a proper amount of development time but which they tried to cram into a 4 KB cartridge instead making sure they had an 8 KB cartridge, which became widely used shortly after the game’s release.
The later releases of the 2600 ports of Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man (the latter post-NES, granted) on 8 KB cartridges were dramatically better ports and quite well-received. Even as the video game industry was crashing in 1983, my father (who worked at a stereo and electronics chain at the time) recalls Ms. Pac-Man cartridges for the 2600 had to be delivered to his chain’s stores by armored cars, as the game was in demand to the point that some early shipments had been hijacked and stolen. That’s the story he and my uncle tell anyways…
Dang and I thought my job sucked!
My brother had that E.T. game. He bought it at a game store liquidation sale after the video game crash. The store must have been charging 50¢ a pail because he had a shitload of crappy titles.
Yeah, I tried playing the E.T. game, and it was as bad as you say. I kept falling into pits and expending my life force levitating out. I think you ate Reece’s Pieces for energy. Dreadful stuff.
I saw a movie on SHOWTIME titled Atari: Game Over. It was a documentary about the excavation of a landfill where a lot of E.T. game cartridges were buried. More entertaining than the game.
you all should play C.H.E.A.T. instead of E.T.
http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/cheat/ a much better game
or maybe the Atari 2600 Myst port
http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/myst_vcs/
though it’s not quite finished yet, actually working on it right now
Wow, that’s impressive.
Hi, @vince.
My younger brother owns an Atari 2600. Can he play your game(s)? I noticed the “Implementation Details” section, but I’m having trouble comprehending it.
I have not played any Atari 2600 games since the early 1980s, so my knowledge is minimal.
about playing my games on real Atari 2600… it is technically possible, but you have to have a flash cartridge (essentially a special cartridge you put an SD card in that lets you play homemade games). so sadly not easily attainable to the average person
In theory you can get custom reproduction cartridges made, but that costs a bit and I’m doing this as a silly hobby and not trying to make it a business
It’s not the same as running on the real thing, but most of the games play fine in various emulators, such as Stella, there are even some online emulators that will play in browser like javatari or even on the internet archive. Unfortunately the Myst game currently breaks all of the online emulators for various reasons.
I do have specific recollection of Intellivision games being for sale for a few dollars each at Kay Bee Toys in the late 80s. I never did get to try Dreadnaught Factor. My personal vote for the best game on the system would be D&D Cloudy Mountain, which honestly has a lot of remarkable qualities for a game being made in 1982.
Late 80s in the US for video gaming was certainly a time. Our house had the InTV but wasn’t the first with NES. Most everyone of my age had NES, while one neighbor had a Tandy and another had a C64. Another one had some other PC of some sort which had carts to use on it that were similar to 2600 in size but I cannot recall what the name of that was at all.
It was a time. The sensation of playing, the audio, the visual, the visceral feedback – it all felt so deeply engaging. Then to look at that same content now it’s amazing to think of how much heavy lifting a lack of life exposure and compensation with imagination carried things. But all the same, people like me grew up as the medium itself grew up. It was a time which will never exist in the same way. Children playing video games today won’t see the medium evolve in the same manner as we have. It’s very tempting to take smug satisfaction in that perspective or at least look down on “kids today” for not having the same exposure and attachment. I try to avoid that. Having that life experience doesn’t automatically make mine “better” than that of a different era. If anything, seeing my younger relatives being completely uninterested and nonplussed in response to my favorites games of youth has helped to keep the tint on my rose glasses in check. “They’re just video games.” As it turns out, this is something which I do in fact understand more now that I am older.
It’s too bad that TB does have the life experience to form a perspective about US superhero comic book content which has a similar kind of evolution, but yet he doesn’t ever seem willing to expound on much of any of it beyond “being a 12 year old and reading new comics while lying on the top of a summer porch with milk and cookies nearby”. Certainly not in the strips and not even in his freeform blogs. He could write about Superman content through the years of radio serials, the Fleischer 40s shorts, and beyond. He could write about what changed between the 60s Batman TV show and the 1989 movie. The past 10 years have been a fertile ground for limitless discussion of US superhero comic book content between all the Marvel and DC movies that have been made; and in response to that opportunity, and with his life experiences to draw upon, TB has given us … this. Just this. Just him on the porch in the late 50s. Gee whiz.
Nostalgia should be inclusive, but in the Funkyverse it’s exclusive and elitist. Tom Batiuk thinks the point of nostalgia is for you to feel exactly the same nostalgia he does for the exact same things in the exact same way. Or you’re not doing it correctly.
Westview feels like a small town in a communist country. Everyone is expected to have so much reverence for things that clearly don’t deserve it. And it’s socially enforced. Lisa’s Legacy Run is like Kim Il-Sung Day in North Korea: you’d better show up and look sad, or your worthiness immediately comes into question.
The “Superman” radio shows are quite fascinating, actually, for they’re the first instances of Superman and the Batman working together (as opposed to sharing a *World’s Finest* cover or cameoing together with the Flash in *All-Star* #7 when Johnny Thunder needs some help contributing to the war orphans fund).
Most fascinating aspect for me: in these stories, the Batman knows that Clark Kent is Superman, and Superman knows that Bruce Wayne is the Batman. Yet from what I’ve heard, Robin doesn’t know that Clark is Superman, though he knows that “Pappy” (as he sometimes calls the Batman) must trust Clark enough to let him know the Dynamic Duo’s secrets.
Well, as long as Jim Harper wouldn’t admit that he was the Guardian, the Newsboy Legin accepted that he wasn’t…
This is back when Robin was the KID sidekick behaving like what a writer wanted a kid to act like. If an adult says or does something, they ‘have’ to know what they’re doing and the kid just has to trust them. That wouldn’t fly today.
I like your point, Mr. Jones. As proof of how things have changed, I refer you to the Outsiders’s team-up with the Teen Titans in the early 1980s.
The Batman leads the Outsiders.
Robin leads the Titans.
Despite his many fine qualities, the Batman is not a good leader; Robin, who’s been calling the shots with his young peers since before they were the Titans (see *Brave and the Bold* #54), is, and, eventually, he tells his mentor to shut up and leave the direction of the battle to him.
Of course, a sidekick/protege who’s come into their own can revert to the old order when meeting the mentor again (think of Miyamoto Usagi reunited with Katsuichi Sensei: when Katsuichi asks his pupil to make tea, Usagi is ready to do so, and hastily says an unconvincing “I knew that” when Katsuichi says he meant his current pupil) and there’s a wonderful *Brave and the Bold* team-up (#182) in which we see that old order reassert itself when it shouldn’t.
The Batman is on Earth-Two.
There, Robin is an adult, older than the Earth-One hero, and his Batman is dead.
In addition, the Earth-One Batman has seen the Batwoman of his world murdered, yet the Batwoman of Earth-Two is very much alive.
Robin defers to the Batman, but clearly doesn’t like it; the Batwoman still resents the fact that the Dynamic Duo know who she is, but that their identities still call for a blindfold en route to the Batcave.
Everyone is glad when the case is over and Starman sends the Batman home.
‘Nuff said, as they say at another comics company.
Kay Bee Toys was not great at picking horses in the video game wars. They were a big buyer of Atari Jaguar stock in the mid-90s and were still trying to offload it through 1998! Resale video game stores like Funcoland cleared out their Jaguar stock (and stopped taking trade-ins) in early 1998, almost a whole year before Kay Bee finally did.
It was the only store in the US to carry the NES, followed by Sears. Of course, neither are around anymore.
A few jobs later, I was the music/video manager for a 90s Northeast department store chain you’ve never heard of, Lechmere. Def my favorite job!
“Atari Jaguar”? We had–and this is hard to type without laughing–demo machines for the 3DO and, YES, VirtuaBoy. (cracks up!)
They…were not good systems. I think we sold 1 3DO, and VirtuaBoy gave about 2/3s of customers migraines after 5 minutes.
We also had demo machines for the Genesis and GameBoy, which seemed a lot more popular. At least for parents who decided to use them as babysitters while they shopped for an hour or more. Yeah, just let your kids play with video games unattended. “No way that could go wrong!” says guy with windowless white van.
The early-mid 90s were a wild time in video games with a lot of experimenting and a lot of failure. It’s quite fun to look back on even if a lot of the games and consoles aren’t really worth revisiting.
I dunk on the Atari Jaguar a lot because I have the misfortune to own one and I know very well what I’m talking about when I mock it… but it’s a heck of a piece of hardware when you learn that Atari built the thing (and its later CD add-on) for pennies compared to what their competition was spending and it demoed well enough for investors that they kept the company afloat 3-4 years longer than it should have been in business because they thought they could find a niche in the market somewhere.
The 3DO group had money behind them and a huge partner in Panasonic. Virtual Boy had Nintendo’s skill and reputation behind it. The CD-I had Phillips’ reputation and relationship with retailers going for it. Sega’s various misfires (CD, 32X, Saturn) were all backed by prestigious 3rd party developers. NEC was bringing a runaway hit console over from Japan (the PC Engine) in the Turbografx-16.
All Atari brought was a known-name tarnished by a decade of near constant failure in the both the video game and computer industries and a cheaply-made “64-bit” console that looked like a toilet seat and played only a little better than one (sometimes worse even, I own a copy of Checkered Flag). They brought the smallest knife to the proverbial gun fight, it’s almost admirable.
The first offline conversation I ever had about NFTs was with a niece and nephew about “Nyan_Cat gif” being sold. Not a single other person besides us out of 18 in the room knew what NFTs were. I just looked it up, and I’m pretty sure it was on Thanksgiving 2021.
Keep up on those trends, Tom! I loved your strip about the danger to our nation’s morals posed by Hula Hoops!
Crankshaft is an asshole who cannot be stopped from being an asshole. People who try to stop his being an asshole get fall victim to what fans of Naruto call ‘plot no jutsu’…..as is evidenced by the Mighty Fist Of HAM smiting anyone who’s had enough of his shit and wants to get his ass fired. The most we get is an impotent look of angry disapproval…..which is what Batiuk sees as the right response. Bad things are not to be dealt with. Bad things are to be helplessly endured.
Still, I would take Ed over Les any day of the week.
I hate the strips that end with someone smirking, when they should be kicking Ed’s a$$.
Crankshaft is an asshole who cannot be stopped from being an asshole.
He absolutely can be stopped from being an asshole. He can be fired from his bus driving job, kicked out of his daughter’s house, fined by the city for being a constant waste of emergency services, sued by any of the people he’s seriously harmed, or confronted by the many people he’s been rude to. Or at least told to knock it off.
That everybody just throws up their hands and says “oh, that wacky bus driver!” belies the realism this world is supposed to have. Realistic people wouldn’t silently tolerate this behavior. Especially when it’s causing structural damage to their home, most people’s single largest investment.
I’m aware that suffering in silence is treated as noble in the Funkyverse. But that just makes the problem worse. It looks like Ed is exploiting this tendency in others. As are Dinkle, Funky, and everyone else I mentioned. Les Moore comes off as a bullied child who’s learned how to bully adults. His use of passive aggression to make you guess what he wants is straight out of the sociopath’s playbook. No one would be Les’ friend now. And if anyone did, they would tell Les he needs professional help.
My memories of Pac-Man center around the games (Ms. Pac-Man, I think by that time) that were built into the glass tops of bar tables. These things were great; you could play a two, three or four-person game and the people who weren’t playing at the moment could enjoy a tasty beverage.
Friend of mine said the secret to Pac-Man is that it’s non-violent and based on eating, which made it sort of a breakthrough game.
On to comics, or whatever it is that Batiuk writes… I think I have now joined the elite club of “canceled commenters,” along with JJ and bwoeh. I posted four comments on yesterday’s “Crankshat” (under my GC name of “puddleglum1066”; don’t ask where that came from because even I don’t know). This morning only one of them was left. Odd which one was not censored, as it was the one that IMO was most unambiguously a critique of Batty’s “writing [sic]” process. The others were more lame-ass puns relating “fungible” to “fungus” (e.g., Ed says “I got a non-fungible token growing between my toes”). Maybe the censor has a foot fetish.
*The Silver Chair* is my favorite of the *Chronicles of Narnia,* in no small part because of Puddleglum!
1066 for the Battle of Hastings?
Good a reason as any. I think it was one of those times when I was prompted to create an account and I used the first things that came into my mind. Now I’m stuck with them…
Kinda like Batty’s writing, isn’t it? Go with the first idea into your brain and then live with it.
“I got a non-fungible token growing between my toes”
Ed would never say that! It’s funny and a legitimate pun! The puns in the strip Brevity are awful, but at least you get them. Ed would something about a pigeon.
Jack the
RipperModerator has returned. A mere 20 comments took me no time at all to read. Odd that the featured comment is snark.I didn’t bother posting a comment today. Even with Ed Crankshaft, the feature is a borefest. “Scammy Shovelware”? Are you kidding me? 🙄🙄🙄
Insert sarcastic “Ha!”
And we all thought Skip Townes and Mason Jarr were bad. TB must be a limbo champion, just when you think he can’t go any lower…
Batiuk broadcasts to the universe that he has no clue what “shovelware” means.
Those video game cartridges I mentioned in another post are a perfect example of shovelware.
“I didn’t even mention the worst offenders: Les Moore and Pete Whateverhisname is.”
Pretty sure Pete’s last name, by general consensus, is Rattabastardo.
Regarding the way it seems everybody in the Batiukverse suffers in silence while taking advantage of the way everybody else suffers in silence… It’s been a few years since I last read it, but this sounds an awful lot like the description of Hell in C. S. Lewis’s little book “The Great Divorce.” It was, as I recall, a very British Hell.
Wait, his last name isn’t “Pete”? I thought his first name was “Mopey”? Dang it, everything I know is a lie!
The Funkyverse and karma definitely has an inverted trend most of the time. Bad luck to milk the most out of misery is definitely a plague upon its denizens (see posterboy Wally Winkerbean, as the deep dive has been noting), with “justice” as fate sees it being limited to the more egregious (Frankie). And even then, nobody really pushes issues far enough to get people in sent packing most of the time; Roberta went from harassing high school and comic book age appropriateness to outright homophobia and all we saw come at her was her husband snap and tell her to shut up (make of that what you will), and last year’s racial profiling store clerk was just told to beat it as Cayla told the kids that that’s just stuff you put up with. Plus of course nobody sued the hospital for screwing up Lisa’s file.
I think as far as karma is concerned, the strip has a habit of trying to cut its “losers” some slack that goes a space elevator too far in balancing out their “tough” lives. Les is the obvious example; Les was the high school nerd loser, never-respected hall monitor who had the bonus struggle of a bad dating cycle that ended in her struggling with teenage pregnancy, snapping at his graduation by ranting about being outcasted by the class culture (which the strip would go on to vilify) went on to a floundering writing career while working high school and pizza-making for over a decade, and kept having bad days like screwing up a $10,000 challenge at a basketball game and his wife becoming a magnet for tragedy/death. Even solving a cold murder case at the risk of his life did nothing for him financially. So what does he get? He finds love again, his daughter becomes a high school sports star, he “works through” his grief with a book that becomes a cult hit and award winning film (said award which he gets to keep), he makes up with and comes up on top of his HS bully, gets a fulfilling trip to a mountain in Africa, and his bloodline becomes influential in creating a future utopia somehow.
And it goes for others as well; Pete and Darin rise from his humble high school nerd days to become “respected” comic/film industry professionals who work with the big companies and launch a blockbuster film franchise, Cindy gets out of her actually-outcast popular kid HS tenure and being married to Funky by breaking big news stories and find love with a Hollywood hunk (and also remain younger than every one of her peers), and Jeff gets to sweeten his hard relationship with his mother and stepfather by fulfilling childhood dreams of recollecting lost comics and seeing the filming spot of his favorite film/serial. Everyone with a tough life gets their rewards, regardless if they seem deserving or cocky about it.
Except the Winkerbean bloodline. Everyone gets old and fat and POW PTSD.
“Make of that what you will…”
Okay, I make it an homage to the “Keeping Up Appearances” episode where Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “Bou-quet,” according to the Lady of the House) is pestering a man at a phone box and her long-suffering husband Richard tells her to stop bothering the caller and get back in the car.
And Hyacinth wilts and limps back to the car, to an adoring stare from the equally long-suffering neighbor Elizabeth and praise from the man in the phone box:
“Oh, well-done, sir! In wartime, they’d give you a medal for courage like that!”
It’s the only instance in the series where Richard does something like that. (Usually if he can thwart Hyacinth, it’s because he has help from someone like his brother-in-law Onslow.)
Given the “R’s” in the Blackburn family, is Mr. Blackburn’s first name “Richard”?
Cindy gets out of her actually-outcast popular kid
Sure, Tom, all the hot teenage babes wanted you back then. They only pretended you were a gross nerd. They became popular because they didn’t want to be! To quote the meme: “Yeah, Grandpa, let’s get you to bed.”
Waaaait–
I just think I noticed something!
All hot blondes love horrible lawn-gnome-looking schlubs who love comic books! As if they had no personal agency, and they are just awarded to them!
(slumps in chair) WOW. Never noticed before!
Banana Jr. 6000, I saw this the other day and thought of you since you’re such a big fan.
Great to see you back in the bloggers chair. 👍
That’s awesome. I want it on my wall. Thank you.
By the way, I found another Deathtongue cover:
This is the level of love people had for Bloom County, and still have almost 40 years later. They not only played the cheap vinyl record that came with the book, they thought the song was worth re-recording when they became adult musicians.
I challenge Tom Batiuk to show me one picture of someone who cosplayed as Lisa any time in the last generation. I’ll even accept ironic, sarcastic cosplay. That’s how irrelevant Funky Winkerbean was: nobody even bothered to make fun of it. Except us, of course.
YW. I love all the classic rock influences, especially the Eddie Van Halen paint scheme on Steve Dallas’s cowbell.
So many of the Bloom County punchlines have made it into my every day speech, i.e. “Run that baby!”, “She was then clubbed and skinned.”,”Oodles of noodles help blue poodles mit der strudel.”, etc.
Is it just me, or did that Funky Winkerbean float on the Simpsons only have a passing resemblance to the comic strip Funky? If we had seen that float without Marge telling us it was him, would anybody have recognized it as Funky? Not me.
You’re right about the cosplayers. If anybody cosplayed as a Funky Winkerbean character, Batiuk would have been all over it and posted the photo in one of his blogs. Instead, we got photographs of vacant Batiuk convention booths with stacks of books, girls bending over tables, or girls talking on the phone in a parking lot. Stalker!
One more. I know the Banana in your name is the computer, but I found this GIF.
My youngest bought me a vintage Atari 2600 for Father’s Day. It came with a slew of games including Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Donkey Kong, the infamous ET and Centipede, at which I once totally rocked. They’re all still fun (with the exception of ET — it was NEVER fun) but, alas, my 60-year-old thumb can’t smash that button nearly as fast as it could back in 1981.
CS 7/28:
She’s thinking “These guys. Here for hours, endless free coffee refills. Tip will be Ed scrawling ‘GIT A BETR JOB’ again. God, how I hate this town!”
Rest of it:
What? I know these words. They’re in English, so I know these words…Why are they is this order? It doesn’t read like English! What are they talking about?
Wait…they summon the Dread One! The Great Monkey Butt!
And no one notices the 110 year old lunatic’s ravings.
To J.J. O’Malley,
I haven’t seen any of your comments on GoComics’ Crankshaft since I mentioned the “Comics I Follow” feature. I just wanted to suggest that you add a few comics to your list, even if you don’t actually read them, in order to appease your critics. I never intended for you to stop commenting on Crankshaft altogether. Apologies for not expressing myself clearly.
There’s another complete howler on the Komix Thoughts blog. Let’s dissect:
When the first part of Lisa’s Story ran in the paper, I talked in interviews about how I had taken the experiences of others and used them to create an internal landscape that I would draw upon as I did the writing.
Okay, fine.
But, having since experienced cancer firsthand with my diagnosis of prostate cancer, I realized that there was a huge void between empathy and personal experience, and that I had only skimmed the surface in the first telling.
Batiuk admits something I’ve long accused him of: being unable to write a story outside of his personal experience and feelings.
I can’t deny that having something happen to you changes your feelings about it. I just ranted about this in the last thread, and why “Pmm Nd Jff” isn’t so funny to me anymore. It’s a cheap joke at the stroke survivor’s expense, that’s pretending to be a show of empathy. It’s a self-contained “Oh, I was just kidding.” Well, you suck at kidding.
This time, when I visited that internal landscape,
Why is he going back to the internal landscape he just told us was inadequate? It would make sense for him to say “I had to rethink my internal landscape” or he had to discard it all together. Here he just goes back to it. Also, WTF is an “internal landscape”? It sounds like the act of imagining a Bob Ross painting.
all of the emotions there were redlining. There was anger that rose to rage and worry that rose to fear
So he learned his internal landscape was inadequate, went back to it, and all he changed was to ramp up the same basic emotions. You know, because he didn’t realize cancer was a problem until he had it.
and optimism that was sledgehammered to a sliver by reality.
This isn’t a “redlined” version of the same emotion. It’s an incoherent metaphor. It wants to be something like “optimism that was honed to a sharp edge,” as if to say your optimism becomes a lot more specific and important when you want your cancer to go away. But that’s not what he wrote. Tom Batiuk writes like Jackson Pollock paints. He just throws words at the page until they kind of look like art. “optimism sledgehammered to a sliver by reality” sounds like it means something, but it doesn’t.
So, my problem then became how to transfer these powerful emotions to the comics page.
It’s called writing. Tom should look into it.
As I had done the first time, I worked on these strips off to the side of the regular work, which made life in the studio pretty busy.
So what? This isn’t relevant at all.
Plus, I overwrote quite a bit as well.
It’s fitting that he said this right after an example of something that should have been cut from the piece…
In fact, when I checked my writing books in preparation for writing this intro
…and right before something that should have been cut from the piece.
I found quite a bit of material that I liked but had never used in the story.
So what? Doing necesssary research for a story is doing your goddam job, Mr. Pulitzer Nominee. If it doesn’t get used, it doesn’t get used. This is basic professional discipline, and Batiuk is announcing to the world that he doesn’t have an ounce of it.
And he’s revealing exactly why he overwrites – because he thinks using all his research is a virtue. Is this why the strip goes on so many pointless tangents? Because they were research Tom Batiuk felt he had to use?
If only you really could get second chances, but, actually, I did get something of a second chance with this work.
“If only you could get second chances in life! Which I totally did.”
When the first part of Lisa’s battle with cancer ran in the strip, I was flown to New York to do a national interview on ABC. Just before the interview the host asked me…
“I went to New York to do a national interview on ABC, but here’s what they asked me off-camera.”
…if I had a book, and I had to tell her that I didn’t.
This seems like atrocious planning. If the existence of a book was an off-the-record question you were ashamed to answer, what the hell was this interview even about? Why did you do it at all? Why did they even ask you to do it? The whole point of creators doing news media interviews is to promote their newest work. If you didn’t have one, this interview must have had some other purpose. It would be nice to know what that was.
When the book collecting that material came out a year later, with the story no longer running in the paper each day, the interest and promotional heat had pretty much dissipated. Coupled with the fact that I had no input on the book and that it was remaindered and consigned to out-of-print limbo in an embarrassingly short period of time
Like I said in the Aldo Kelrast article, Batiuk is trying to blame the failure of Lisa’s Story on everybody but himself. And he’s tacitly admitting it was a failure.
As I climbed the steps up the hill to Lowry Hall and the home of the Kent State University Press,
For some reason he switches to italics here. He didn’t forget to turn it off; he turns italics on and off every single sentence. Despite there being no reason to turn it on in the first place. You know that meme where Homer Simpson is such a bad cook his cereal catches on fire?
I was thinking about the time that had passed since I had been on campus. To be honest, when I was a student there, I never saw this coming.
He went to a university, and now returns to it as an adult to pitch his creative work to them. This is a perfectly good time to ponder your journey in life.
The way I see it, it was my pursuit of culture that led to my academic downfall.
Do I even need to say what his “culture” entails?
It was the first week of my freshman year, and I was in downtown Kent looking for a place where I could find some comic books. I checked all the usual suspects—the drugstore, the supermarket, the tobacco shop—and had found nothing. It began to dawn on me that the town of Kent was culturally deprived. But I didn’t give up, and finally I was directed to a place about a mile out of town. It was called the Kent Kozy Korner. It was a townie place, and I truly doubt that any other student from the university had ever been there before or since.
Okay, now read that paragraph again, but replace “comic books” with “drugs.” This is what Tom Batiuk sounds like. He sounds like the kind of braindead stoner you meet in college. Who can’t function without weed, can’t go to class because he needs to buy weed, and can’t even have a conversation about anything other than weed.
The Kent Kozy Korner became my shelter from the storm. It was where I nurtured my dreams and studied my craft. I was being homeschooled by Stan Lee, and this was where class met.
No, class met in the classroom. That Tom Batiuk chose not to go to the classroom was his decision.
Skipping class to go buy comic books the day they came out became a bit of a habit. Toss in the fact that I once skipped a final to go pick up a Beatles album that had dropped that day and it’s easy to see why the university and I had a few issues.
No, it’s not easy to see at all. If you want to skip class, the college will just fail you and move on. You’re not in high school anymore, and it’s not the university’s job to make you go to class. It’s revealing that Tom Batiuk doesn’t seem to have learned this, even at age 76. It explains why every single character has acted like high schoolers for the last 30 years, even though they’ve long since aged past it. He can’t write about anything but his own point of view, and his own point of view is incredibly stunted.
So, I met with the staff at the Press and made my pitch waving my hands in the air and saying, “Imagine if you will . . . ,”
Can you imagine working at a university press, having a pitch meeting with your most prominent alumni, and this is the first thing he says? It’s the most cliche term paper opening on earth. Their eyes must have rolled so hard you could actually hear it.
I thanked them for (publishing the Lisa book) and also for not checking my academic record.
Why would they? They’re the university’s publishing house, not the registrar. Tom’s not applying for graduate school. Employers don’t care that much about your grades, except in academic fields. Again, this betrays Batiuk’s very juvenile ideas about how the world works.
They pointed out that they had found there was actually an inverse correlation between college grades and the ability to write well.
No, they didn’t. There’s no way this exchange happened. For one thing, college-educated people would know the difference between “no relation” and “inverse relation.” I can accept that grades aren’t an indicator of a lot of things people use them to indicate. But I refuse to believe that getting good grades actually makes you worse at writing.
This is Tom Batiuk trying to make his life into some kind of underdog story. He wants you to believe that because he had the genius to skip class and read comic books, that he succeeded in life as a result. I’ll just say “Survivorship Bias” and leave it at that.
I will forgive anybody who, like me, tells a story and then pauses to think about an extraneous detail. The thing is to notice when you’re doing it, say “that doesn’t matter” and continue the story. I had a friend whose stories took forever to tell. “On Tuesday–wait, or was it Thursday? Hmm, I didn’t go the grocery store yet, so it was Tuesday. Around noon–well, maybe it was closer to 3–” and we’d say “GET ON WITH IT!” (That’s not an exaggeration. He had 2 brothers, one working on his PhD and the other a waste case. He’d do the opposite as well, and tell a story about “my brother” without saying which one, despite that being necessary info. JAY got arrested for drunk driving?! Oh, it was Rob? I guess it was Thursday then!) I’ll forgive it in speech, but not in writing. “It’s called editing.”
A university town is “culturally deprived” because it didn’t have a comic book shop? In the late 60s? I quit comics around that time, around age 10, because it was something society thought children bought. Good thing Tom had the foresight to look around and realize there was nothing of cultural importance going on then! Especially at KENT FUCKING STATE
Crimeny, what a self-obsessed egomaniac he is.
(did you notice the whole brothers thing was me adding extraneous detail? Pulitzer if you did!)
“It sounds like the act of imagining a Bob Ross painting.”
Like Émile Zola for Dreyfus, I rise in Bob Ross’s defense. His deceptively effortless work to create an attractive image (which I believe he would not attempt to liken to any of the Masters), is similar to Batiuk’s only in a superficial sense. Ross had worked hard to hone his skill to appear effortless while Batiuk refuses to apply effort beyond the bare minimum.
Oh, I love Bob Ross. I think he’s extremely talented, and charming as hell. Didn’t mean to impugn him at all. It’s just what the phrase “internal landscape” made me think of.
BJr6k,
Sorry that my faux outrage implied criticism of you. That wasn’t my intent. Your invocation of Bob Ross DID set up a comparison of the work habits of the two in my mind.
We’ve all remarked about TomBa’s “first thought, best thought – don’t edit me” mind set. I’m willing to bet that if TomBa watched Bob’s show the lesson HE would take out of it would be “See! The work of True Artists (like Bob and me) springs spontaneously in a perfect form and needs no revision!”, fully unaware of the meticulous planning that led to what was presented.
I remember reading that Ross would actually do three paintings of each show’s work, two done before the show was taped. In essence, what we saw on TV was akin to a visual version of a musician’s performance, a “note for note” reproduction of a well-practiced piece.
Thanks for the opportunity to allow me to reminisce. I think I’ll look for an episode of his show on demand.
No worries, I didn’t take it that way. And you’re absolutely right that Tom Batiuk wouldn’t see how much effort Bob Ross puts in. Ross looks like he’s winging it, but he’s very in control of things. He also has a great ability to adapt to “happy little accidents” and not let them ruin his flow. Which also sets a good example for his art students.
Another important thing Ross does that Batiuk doesn’t: he invites you into his world. You may not want to learn painting, or even be interested in watching it. But he’s always talking about his passion for nature and animals; about his encounters with fans; about his own life and places he’s visited; and why painting means so much to him. It’s so honest and unpretentious. When the show’s over, you want to buy him a beer.
Compare that how Tom Batiuk, and his avatars Les and Lillian, treat their fans. They’re annoyed by their fans, view them as inferior, and get peeved by everyone who isn’t enjoying things “correctly” – a standard they can’t be bothered to define.
Tom Batiuk could learn a lot from Bob Ross. He could learn how to be the man he thinks he already is.
Bob Ross was indeed more talented than he appeared to be, and had several qualities TB sorely lacks:
1. He had no pretenses to being a great artiste or making a bold statement about Mankind. He just wanted to immerse himself in a beautiful, happy imagined landscape, to take a little mental vacation, and he wanted his audience to enjoy doing the same.
2. Instead of bragging of his own special skill, he downplayed it. He suggested that anyone in the audience could create something similar. (Anyone who’s ever picked up a brush or palette knife knows that’s not true; it takes a long time to pick up these skills, and some really will never develop the “eye.”)
3. He wasn’t overbearing. He gently invited his viewers into his world of Alaskan landscapes and fostered wildlife. He never expressed irritation at people who painted the “wrong” way, and he never addressed his critics.
And finally, I cannot resist twisting the knife a bit:
4. Unlike TB, Bob Ross has made a lasting impact on the culture. Even people who’ve never watched the show know his image and his catchprases, especially “happy little trees” and “there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.”
Given his known propensity toward retconning everything, who knows how much of his rambling gibberish is even true? Much like the notion that he took FW in a more serious, mature direction as an artistic choice, perhaps his comic spinner memories are all vastly exaggerated or flat-out bullshit.
Re: his “book”. Boy oh boy, he’s never going to forgive the world for not embracing “Lisa’s Story” as this century’s cultural touchstone, is he? It was never a “book” at all, but merely a collection of previously published comic strips bound in book form. People didn’t buy it because they’d already read it, and thus had no reason to read it again, especially considering the fact that it really wasn’t that good to begin with.
He’s basically confirming that we were right, and that he essentially spent a solid six or seven years using FW as a platform to shill cancer books to his readers. We bagged on him for years and years about this, and we were completely vindicated. It makes you wonder what else we were right about, too.
The phrase “Legend in His Own Mind” does seem particularly apt.
Great analysis of Tom’s dreadful and incoherent writing.
Wait….Tom Batiuk was at ComicCon and I missed him?
I guess he didn’t have a talk scheduled, or a table where he was selling books. (Correction: offering books for sale.)
I genuinely hope he enjoyed himself. It’s a pretty upbeat event, and I’d like to think that everyone attending is having a good time.
Answering CBH’s question from the other day about what I saw at ComicCon, I mostly tried to target talks by writers and/or behind the scenes folks chatting about their work. There were panels on 80’s animated shows, Star Wars, Star Trek, Batman, etc. etc. Newer shows, too, (Good Omens, f’r instance) but those people are generally more interested in plugging their upcoming season.. They don’t have as many good BTS stories to tell, as they’re still trying to work with the same crew and executives and don’t want to ruffle any feathers.
I’m generally far more interested in TV and film than in comics per se, but there were also some fun ‘quick draw’ exhibitions and discussions.
The dealer floor is WAY too crowded (and expensive) to stay for too long, but it’s amazing to see how much stuff there is out there …. 90% of which I will never have time to see!
Cosplay was maybe a little (slightly) less prominent than usual, but still strong. However, the cosplayers who are competing in the masquerade event are discouraged from attending the other con events in costume, so that their ‘reveals’ at the masquerade have more impact. So that may have affected the overall vibe during the con itself.
Thanks for the video game memories! My daughter gave me a mini-Ms. Pac Man game this past year for Christmas and I love it-partly for the game and partly because my lovely kiddo knew to get me something retro!
My absolute favorite video arcade game of all time is Crazy Climber-a double joystick game where you maneuvered a guy up giant skyscrapers while these little demons would pop out of the windows and drop flower pots on your head and try to knock you off the building. Other obstacles included falling girders, electric signs, birds that dropped eggs and bird doo, and a King Kong ape that flipped its arm at you as you passed. If you reached the top of the building, a helicopter took you away, there were cheers and synthesized music and then you started at the next skyscraper-four in all. It was silly but the graphics were colorful, the music was fun, and the sound effects were pretty good too. If you paused too long, the climber would say “Go for it!”
I also liked Centipede, Tempest, Tetris, and the Pac-Man games. 80s arcades were a blast! And we had our Atari 2600 as well. No ET, but we did have the disappointing Pac-Man. Flat bare bones graphics and terrible sound effects! My favorite of the home video games was called MegaMania which I think was actually an Activision game. It was similar to Centipede with all these weird shapes (hamburgers, fries, dice) falling toward you in different patterns and you had to shoot them and clear the screen. I ran the score up to the maximum once, which turned out to be 999,999. When it hit that, the score bar stopped and a message popped on the screen that said Congratulation. No S, no exclamation point. My dad took a photo of the screen with the intent of sending it to the game company for bragging rights but I don’t know if we ever actually did that.
There is a place in Brookfield, IL called the Galloping Ghost Arcade which houses hundreds of old classic video games. You can go in and play all day if you want for a flat rate, and you can even go grab a bite to eat and return later. My family and I visited there a few years ago during a Chicago trip, and we had such a fun time. I got to play Crazy Climber again, my husband found Galaga, and even our daughter found some retro games that she liked.
After all of that reminiscing, I’d like to actually tie this into FW so please forgive me suddenly veering into sad territory. I visited that Galloping Ghost Arcade because I learned about it online from my friend Tom-a former radio/TV co-worker here in Indy who fought a very public battle with cancer. He was a total Star Wars/sci-fi nerd, and was a knowledgeable & wonderfully personable on-air talent. Christmas kicked off for him when he heard Brian Setzer Orchestra holiday tunes, and I once heard him spontaneously sing the Archies theme song for reasons I can no longer recall. When he was diagnosed, several of his friends pooled their resources and funded a trip to California for him while he still healthy enough to go. Whether he was travelling to LA, up to an arcade in Illinois or just spending time with his loved ones, he packed as much living as he could during his year and a half battle. And he fought hard till the very end.
I’ve lost numerous friends and family to cancer, as no doubt most of us have at some point in our lives. I was much closer to some of them than I was to my friend Tom. But he is the one I think of whenever we talk about Lisa’s cancer arc. Online, he shared days where he felt miserable-where his body was failing and he was stuck being tethered to hospital machines. But more often than not, he shared positive, upbeat messages and activities and continuously showed that he loved life-even when he knew he had little time left. And I am grateful to have crossed paths with him for a bit because he was a guy worth knowing. But Lisa-her entire story is “she died from cancer”. What memories did she leave behind for anyone that weren’t cancer related? Summer probably has few memories of her, aside from her feeding the birds. We’ve never really known what kind of person she was-why she was loved. It’s been pushed so much by the author that Lisa’s sole importance is her death from cancer, and that is really sad to me.
Mela, that was wonderful!
Lisa is an embodiment of “tell, don’t show” as a character. In total exposure through the strip, we see more of her in video tape lectures than in person, right?
Galloping Ghost is a treasure. I don’t get to go there as often as I would like. It’s a privilege that I’ve been able to play things like Battle Garegga, G Darius, and Epsgaluda on actual cabinets.
I lamented the absence of Ed Crankshaft during the entire Comic-Con story arc. After this past week, I can’t wait for him to leave.
Is this what Ed Crankshaft is limited to, Tom Batiuk? Half-assed word play? I don’t care for it. I don’t care for it at all.
Even the folks at the Comics Curmudgeon are having difficulty snarking on “Crankshaft”. I think only a few people commented on it at all. Not funny. Not snarkable. Just dull… dull… dull.
It was literally the same punchline for 6 days. “No, Ed’s right! He is suffering from horrible dementia!” Not the deepest mine for humor there.
And there is no way in Ohio Hell that Ed would use the word “exude.” He could only have heard it in conversations, and I’m guessing the 110-year old illiterate walking crime scene doesn’t hang out with people who do. Beyond this week’s strips, anyway. Remember, these people don’t know what “smidgen” means.
And WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COMIC BOOK INVESTMENT LIST?!
I’ll sell you my Kirby run of Eternals, Ed! Heck, I’ll throw in Captain Victory and His Galaxy Rangers! For the low, low price of–how much you got, rube?
Jack the ̷R̷i̷p̷p̷e̷r̷ Moderator strikes again. My comment from yesterday was removed, again. I guess saying,”Ed Crankshaft
exudeseludes intelligence” is some kind of massively offensive comment. I didn’t know the GoComic commenting policy for bullying and harassing extended to the comic strip characters. Oh, well, a boring comic strip deserves a boring comment section. A whole whopping 13 comments yesterday.If I can’t snark on that horsesh*t comic strip, I’m sure as hell not going to continue wasting any time reading it. The GoComics comic strip formerly known as “Crankshaft” has been removed from the “Comics I Follow”. The GoComics moderation team can bite me.
Any Crankshaft comics I read will be in the distant archive.
Eve, I’m not gonna try to talk you out of quitting this time.
I guess you and JJ are someone’s vendetta. The moderator–I’m thinking that there’s only one–says “I’ll look at that in a few days, when no one will even check” and that’s it.
But why am I immune? I’m pretty obnoxious. (well, you all knew that anyway)
Jack the ̷R̷i̷p̷p̷e̷r̷ Moderator strikes again. Today’s “Crankshaft” features a whopping total of 9 comments.
The prize-winning featured comment is “That’s a lot of big Easter eggs.”. Let’s all give a big round of applause for the moderator’s mother.